Escaped Murder Suspect Captured Sunday Following Three-day Search

June 22, 2009 by Suzanne Conlon

Timothy Wayne Murray, a murder suspect who escaped from St. Tammany Parish jail in Louisiana Thursday, was captured early Sunday and returned to jail.

Murray, 29, has been charged with the murder.  Although authorities will not release details on how Murray escaped from jail, he allegedly starved himself in order to be able to fit through a small opening in the maximum security wing.  Jason Gainey, Eric Buras, and Gary Slaydon also escaped at the same time as Murray, but all three were captured by Friday afternoon.

The jail that the men escaped from was rebuilt to be a modern, maximum-security prison about eight years ago and holds inmates already convicted of serious crimes as well as those like Murray who are awaiting trial.  It has been operating at maximum capacity for most of 2009, a situation which may have contributed to the ability of the inmates to escape.  “Four inmates were able to defeat the structure of the maximum security area of our jail,” said Sheriff Jack Strain early Friday.

The sheriff’s office learned of the escape around 9pm Thursday when a resident called and said that he saw a man in a prison uniform behind a local grocery store several blocks from the jail.

It took hundreds of police officers, dozens of police dogs, two helicopters and thermal-imaging equipment to carry out the search that eventually led to the capture of Murray in a wooded area in the Folsom area of Louisiana.  In addition to searching for the missing inmates, officers had to go door to door warning residents of the escaped inmates.

According to the American Correctional Association and The Corrections Yearbook, about 3 percent of inmates either escape or are absent without leave from prison at some time while serving their sentence, amounting to approximately 6000 inmates per year.  About 400 of these are from maximum security prisons.

A press conference about the escapes will be held at 1pm Monday at the Sheriff’s Office in Slidell, Louisiana.